Month: May 2013

WFS-india, a voluntary organization has been created a month back by some enthusiastic people wanting to see some gender parity in FOSS world. The group decided to organize a Localization Hackathon event on the eve of Cultural Freedom Day on 20th may, 2013 from 08:00pm to 09:30pm at the above mentioned channel.

The event aimed to get participants localize a few strings from ayny of Mozilla, Fedora or VLC Media Player. It was attended by seven participants from across the globe . More details about the participants are given below in the chat log. The session was coordinated by Chandan Kumar with the assistance of Biraj karmakar and Runa Bhattacharjee. Amani_glugcal, kaustavdm, Priyankanag also helped in the event.

People learnt what is localization and how to get started in any language by using transifex and pootle server. They were asked to contact the language co-rodinators via mailing lists if they face any issue. Due to lack of time the participants could not start translating any string.

It was realized that it is not possible to hold a full localization workshop within a short span of 1 hour. Participants faced various problem with one not being able to log in to one not finding her language in the list of languages.

But overall it was a nice event where people took out time from their schedule and tried to contribute to FLOSS.

* The chat log of the event can be found at – http://fpaste.org/13234/
* This report has been prepared from the original report written by Chandan Kumar.
* The next meeting of the group is at #wfs-india on freenode on 27 May, from 9:30pm IST.

Women in Free Software India is organizing an online Localization Hackathon for women on Monday 20 May 2013 that is Cultural Freedom Day. Our goal is to include more women in Free and Open Source Software.This event will be good for anyone new or not yet aware of FOSS and it doesn’t require any programming experience. Please join us from 8pm to 9pm tomorrow at #wfs-india channel on http://webchat.freenode.net/ to participate.

Finally, things are taking shape. We got a very few but dedicated people interested to promote FOSS among women in India. After the first two meetings we decided to have this online event where

we will have an online digital art competition

a Mediawiki hackathon

an event on localization.

Everything is in planning stage right now. But we want to make FOSS attractive for girls/women in India to first use it and then contribute to it. When they hear about this event or attend it, they should feel – yeah, it’s cool – I want to do this.

Have to plan some cool promotional materials for it.

There’s one big obstacle though. People, especially women in India think of FOSS as something “geeky” – not to be touched by everyone. That it is not easy to use.

If we do not address these myths, they will continue using third grade proprietary software without even trying any other alternative!

Please share your ideas/suggestions on how to make this event interesting and appealing to women in India.